


Secrets

by Orockthro



Category: Aubrey-Maturin Series - Patrick O'Brian
Genre: Alternate Universe, Diana Villers POV, F/M, Spies and intrigue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-20 12:30:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17022660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orockthro/pseuds/Orockthro
Summary: Diana goes through Maturin’s things out of habit. She has done so for years, long before they wed; it is in her unchangeable nature to be suspicious of everyone, especially those she loves.(Or, Diana finds more than she expected in Stephens's belongings. She finds an understanding, and a new aspect of her husband...)





	Secrets

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Vaznetti](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vaznetti/gifts).



Diana goes through Maturin’s things out of habit. She has done so for years, the pattern established long before they wed; it is in her nature to be suspicious of everyone, especially the man she loves.

So when her Maturin comes to her after a day doing whatever it is he does and crawls upon her bed to sleep for a few hours before going back to his birds or his rats or the tedious Latin texts that occupy him while he and cousin Jack are on land, she kisses his sleeping head and takes to looking through his purse and jumbled belongings.

Diana adores Maturin, but she has been under the control of too many men during the course of her life not to keep her wits about her at all time and to be looking, always, for when they will betray her. She would never expect it of her Maturin, but she didn’t expect it of others, either. And so she feels not a whit of guilt as she runs her hands across his bank notes, feels the unpleasant soppiness of some dead creature stuffed into his purse, and finally brushes a finger across a thick piece of parchment, folded and secreted inside his wig, which she bade him remove upon entering her room.

The letter is a simple summons to the Admiralty post-haste, devoid of explanation or propriety, addressed to him as "Maturin" without his honorific. It is exceptionally informal, for such a thing as a summons to the Navy, and indicates a familiarity between whoever was at the pen and her Maturin; this is not the first of such summons he has received, ye she has heard not a word of this aspect of his life. Not a breath even in his fevered dream talk.

Over the years she has found other such letters, never so obvious as this one, but letters none-the-less that lead her now towards an understanding she had not anticipated. As she sits in her room in her wonderful home that her Maturin has helped create for her, she thinks to other years, other pieces of understanding: scraps of paper ripped from journals with scribbles on them about things quite obviously not related to birds; his scarred hands which he refuses to tell her of; his frequent disappearances not at all unlike her own. She had been quick to assume the reason for his flighty nature was a mirror to her own. Now, in her padded chair looking at her Maturin dressed fully and getting dirty her lovely bed with his boots, she wonders how she could be so blind. Her Maturin is nothing like her, which is why she can love him so much.

She has been married before and lost more lovers than she cares to dwell on, and Maturin, despite his overtures for her attention, has few romantic bones in his slight body. By the time they are wed, they have known each other for years, and she feels she must know him as well as anyone on this Earth could. He is her Maturin, and she holds for him an affection unlike she has held for a man before. It is not the burning love she has felt for others, nor is the flush of infatuation or the resignation of duty she fears so deeply. She finds that she enjoys him, in all his odd ways, for no other reason than he is hers.

Diana has always been a woman to run headlong towards the things in life that present the clearest dangers. Hesitation has never stopped her, and here it does not either.

She kisses her husband on the cheek and pulls the wax balls from his ears. He has not taken laudanum, and shifts under her hand, already easing from sleep.

"Maturin," she says. It takes him several minutes to wake, which she is used to, and she spends the time pressing smooth the gown she still wears, not having yet dressed herself for bed knowing she would  see him home in a coach for he had mentioned having work yet to do.

"Diana, joy, what is it?"

"I found something in your things, Maturin. No, don’t chastise me, I am well aware that you go through my things much the same and I do not stop you. Unlike certain members of my dear family, I am not a woman to suffer in ignorance, nor a woman to let things go unsaid. So I will ask you plainly, are you a spy?"

He stills, and it's then that she knows it is true. "Where did you come to such an idea?" he asks, as if it is impossible. But she can see in his face, as she always can, her Maturin, that he is horrified.

Maturin is a devilishly clever, pointed, fiendish man, with an appetite for knowledge and none for his supper. He is brave in the way that all men who serve in the navy are brave, but not in any special way. And, of course, he is a man of science, a doctor, his profession making up for his lack of social connections, but altogether cementing him as a respectable man.

That is her Maturin.

"So it's true then," she says instead of the reply he would have her give that he could refute. "I wonder how long I might not have known, if not for a simple letter in your wig. Did you think I would not respect you? That I would spill your secret to the world?"

"Of course not, dearest." He is sitting up now, eyes still hazy with sleep but sharpening with every second, her darling clever Maturin.

"I do not abide being lied to, Stephen. Or used as if I were some simpleton woman you keep like a horse in a barn to be brought out when you want to play."

"Never, soul."

"So we're understood, then?"

He looks at her, confused and she laughs and leans down again to kiss him.

*

He goes to the Admiralty that evening after they kiss and love one another, and though he looks green in the face, he sits her down in his untidy and horrid room in the Grapes and tells her everything after he returns. She wipes the crumbs from the chair before she sits, and breathes through her mouth to avoid the smell of decay coming from the closet; no doubt another one of Maturin’s experiments left too long to the course of nature.

"Had I known you were to be this insistent a woman, I'd have never proposed." He says to her haughtily once she is settled, but she knows he does not mean it, and smiles at him.

"Which time, my dear?"

"You are utterly deplorable."

"Perhaps. But I am your deplorable wife, and you are my deplorable Maturin.

He tells her of his work. Not all of it; she can sense tales abbreviated for her benefit, or perhaps because her Maturin is not quite capable of telling an uncensored tale to save himself, he has been at this so long for it to become a part of him as much as his bones.

So strange that she should only see it so clearly now.

And when he is finished telling her the story of his life, he looks up at her, expectantly and with hesitation she is unused to in his eyes.

“Well, my love, you have it now. More even than Jack, likely, though only because he professes to not wish to know.”

“That is cousin Jack for you; he is not me.”

He grins wolfishly at her. “Indeed.”

And then he quiets, fiddling with some medical piece or another, an oddly child-like habit she is unused to seeing.

“And now? Will you still have me?”

Oh, her silly Maturin. How could he ever think otherwise. “Of course. I wanted you when you were penniless, when you were a physician without a practice, when you spent every waking hour studying your damnable creatures and not a single hour devoted to me. I have wanted you year after year, and this changes only one thing for me; in all of this, only one.”

“And what is that?”

“I suppose you will simply have to supply me with a better remedy for seasickness. You and cousin Jack sail in a fortnight, correct? I told you, I am not a woman to be kept behind; I won’t have it, and I grow bored. You are my husband, Maturin, and I wish to know you in all the ways you would have me, including this.”

He pauses. It is now well past dark, the moon hidden behind the clouds and the only light in the rooms Stephen keeps is from the lamps they have lit and the fire banked to keep warm. It lights him eerie and strange, and it sends thrills down Diana’s body.

She has always been a woman to throw herself headlong into danger and excitement, after all.


End file.
